Post-Sept. 11 the ongoing quest to re-brand industry's environmental
critics as dangerous extremists is being pursued with renewed vigour.

Even mainstream environmental groups are portrayed as deeply sinister.
Note in the article below for instance: "extreme anarchist or nihilist
entities such as Greenpeace... widely known" for tactics that jeopardise
"both lives and property".

The inevitable conclusion in the light of all this "ecofundamentalism"
and "ecoterrorism" which, of course, have much in common with "terrorist
ideologies centered in the Middle East"?

Ecoterrorism "...should be given the same new awareness, focus and prosecution
priorities as those terrorist attacks that awakened and shook the American
psyche on Sept. 11"

***

Ecoterrorism: An Overlooked Threat to the U.S.

Paul Taylor
Insight on the News
December 10 2001

The perverted ideology-over-humanity beliefs that motivated the terrorist
attacks on New York City and Washington are analogous to the hateful motivations
of ecoterrorists operating today in the United States.

The new awakening of Americans to the horrifying, incomprehensibly evil
attacks by terrorists on Sept. 11 is being used to establish new domestic-security
measures in our immigration, transportation and communication systems.
The liberalization of these systems of American government and commerce
during the last quarter-century have placed our very survival in jeopardy.

The suspected terrorists appear to be from a religiously aligned extremist
group where ideology eclipses the value of human life. America, and Americans,
are forever changed by the aerial hijacking and bombings of terrorists
who have exploited the flamboyant arrogance of those among us who are too
cowardly to understand that the truest and darkest forms of evil do exist
in the human heart. The last decade of American political obsession with
"political correctness" has emasculated our military, intelligence and
criminal-justice systems, rendering them blind and wholly ineffective in
maintaining that most-basic responsibility of the federal government: national
security.

Mimicking religious movements, the environmental movement has grown
worldwide to become the largest, most-densely-organized political cause
in human history. Environmentalism, and its environmentalist believers,
have become skilled at gaming the U.S. environmental-regulatory system
for political advantage in the guise of politically correct progressive
public service as tax-exempt organizations. Noted for particularly aggressive
growth and fund raising, U.S. environmental groups have grown from about
2,000 to more than 4,000 as tax-exempt, nonprofit organizations in the
last decade.

As nationally or internationally organized groups, environmentalists
can become radical, extreme, anarchist or nihilist entities such as Greenpeace
or Earth First with truly ecoterrorist tendencies. Greenpeace is widely
known for its eco-stunts of installing human chains and large
protest signs on ships, trees, skyscrapers and bridges, jeopardizing
both lives and property. Something even more disturbing called the Earth
Liberation Front (ELF) has, in recent years, taken responsibility for firebombings
of U.S. housing-development construction sites, timber-harvesting operations
and genetic-engineering research laboratories.

While extremist ecogroups such as Greenpeace and Earth First may not
be supporting ecoterrorists directly, neither have these groups issued
firm public condemnations of ecoterrorists. The FBI has recorded and investigated
more than 30 attacks in the United States by ecoterrorists in the last
five years. ELF and the Animal Liberation Front have been connected to
many of these ecoterrorist attacks. Like other terrorist groups, ecoterrorist
groups operate beneath our "security radar" among covert, loose cells that
convene only in the mass anonymity of World Trade Organization or antiglobalization
demonstrations.

The central organizational medium of ecoterrorists is the Internet and
a college-dropout computer hacker who lives in Oregon. Radical environmentalists
are intolerant of growth, prosperity and free enterprise. More extreme
ecofundamentalists and ecoterrorists hate capitalism, political diversity
and corporate global trade - the same as terrorist ideologies centered
in the Middle East.

To date, U.S. ecoterrorist acts have included firebombings and arson
attacks. One flurry of incidents destroyed logging camps and equipment
with firebombs in the Northwest. In a May 2001 incident, simultaneous arson
attacks on a genetic-engineering lab at the University of Washington and
a tree farm in Oregon destroyed the research records that included new
seed plants for starving African tribes. New housing-construction projects
in New York, Colorado and Arizona have been torched, leaving walls scrawled
with "ELF." A remote, multimillion-dollar mountaintop resort in the Rocky
Mountains was burned to the ground, and ELF members are prime suspects.
ELF ideology deems these attacks to be nonviolent because no lives have
been lost.

However, we should have no doubt that property destruction is a violent,
criminal act under the law and that loss of human life will be the eventual
result of such acts of ecoterrorism. U.S. ecoterrorist acts are well-known
and documented and should be given the same new awareness, focus and prosecution
priorities as those terrorist attacks that awakened and shook the American
psyche on Sept. 11.

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